Lessons from the Field: Phishing

Phishing an organization with a work-from-home program

Category

Incident Response and Management

Risk Management

Phishing is nothing new, however it remains a tactic more powerful than ever.

In a recent engagement, Chris Carlis, Security Analysis Consultant, capitalized on local news about an upcoming storm to build a phishing campaign aimed at an organization to offer a work from home program. All they had to do was log in and take a brief survey.

The scary part is, 50% of workers responded giving the technical testing team full access to organization's VPN. Do you think your organization is educated enough to look out for these types of tactics? Watch the video to learn more about this the dangers of phishing.

Video Transcript:

So a lot of times we will do social engineering or phishing engagements and we try to mimic what the bad guys do, we'll use local and current events when building our phishing campaign. Recently we were doing an engagement where there had been severe winter storms where roads were closed and we knew that getting to work for this organization was going to be a hassle, so we crafted a phishing campaign that was a survey that essentially said we are building a work from home program and if you are interested in taking part in this work from home program, log into this website and fill out a brief survey.

It was a popular idea, we had over 50% of respondents provide usernames and passwords for their network just to be included in this survey, we were able to use those credentials to log into their VPN, and gain access to their internal network. So obviously this comes down to user education and continuous testing of users to make sure the message is getting through that phishing is something everyone in the organization that everyone needs to be be looking out for.